Cancer institute urged to spend less on research

Houston gets the lion's share of the $300 million the state cancer institute allocates annually, but some of the city's leading soldiers in the war Thursday called for less of the money to go toward discovering cures.

The state should instead invest more taxpayer dollars in disease prevention and private startups, leaders with the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas were told at a regional planning meeting in Houston. That suggestion continues a mostly statewide pattern of such advice.

Walter Klemp, CEO of the Houston biotech Moleculin, told the crowd of about 110 that "many people do not realize commercialization is research's best friend. The more money we spend on commercialization, the more research becomes the hero. We can spend all the research dollars we want, but if we don't bring a single drug to the patient, we've failed."

The two comments captured the mood of the fourth and next-to-last of a series of meetings the institute is holding around the state to get input about the direction it should take as it enters the fourth of its 10 years.

CPRIT, a $3 billion initiative approved by voters in 2007 and launched in 2009, boasts a pot of funding dollars second only to the federal government's National Cancer Institute. The agency sailed along smoothly until this spring, when its Nobel Prize-winning chief scientific officer resigned in protest over irregularities in the process that led to the hasty approval of its large award, a commercialization grant to UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Rice University.

In the aftermath of the controversy, the institute began reassessing its priorities, including getting input from stakeholders regarding its allocation of resources. Thus far, it has doled out 73 percent of its funding for research, 17 percent for commercialization and 10 percent for prevention efforts.

Commercialization

In a vote by raised hands, twice as many people favored increasing prevention funding - most to 11 to 25 percent, but a small percentage to more than 25 percent - as favored keeping it at 10 percent. Any such change would require legislative action since the original legislation specified 10 percent.

Attendees also favored increased commercialization's funding. Again, twice as many favored increasing commercialization funding - most to "more than 25 percent" but some to more than 50 percent and some to 16 to 25 percent - as favored keeping it around 15 percent.

Commercialization officials made up a significant portion of the crowd, but CPRIT officials said academic researchers were in attendance in greater numbers.

Online survey ending

More funding for prevention and commercialization was also favored at previous meetings in Austin and Lubbock, CPRIT officials said. The exception was Dallas, where attendees preferred research to get the most of the funding.

The last of the meetings is Friday in San Antonio. Bill Gimson, CPRIT's executive director, said the staff will coalesce the input from the five meetings, and from an online survey that closes Friday, and put together a recommendation to bring to the governing board in either December or January.

He said any recommendation won't call for quotas.

Process problems involving the M.D. Anderson-Rice grant did not come up at the Houston meeting Thursday.